eucatastrophe n. eucatastrophic [ < Gr. eu, "good" and catastrophe Coined by JRR Tolkien.] 1. (in a narrative) The event that shifts the balance in favor of the protagonist when all seems lost. 2. A happy ending.

November 2014

11/29/2014

Before there was an America, there were taxes in Britain. Of all the different types of taxes, excise taxes (what we would call “sales taxes” or “luxury taxes”) were seen as a stable way to raise money there because war did not interfere with such taxes and because the taxes were conveniently levied at the source of the production (thus directly affecting a few business owners who would pass the tax on down to consumers who could be expected to direct any resentment at the seller rather than at the tax collector). In other words, it was a great way to tax without everyone sensing that it was the government doing it (still is). Excise taxes were also regarded as voluntary because people paid only as they elected to consume. The government could say, “You don’t have to buy these products.”

The Whiskey Rebellion by Thomas Slaughter attempts to establish the context, chronology, and consequences of the events of 1791 when the National Government determined to suppress its first real civil insurrection over taxation policy. Secretary of the Treasury, Alexander Hamilton, had determined to raise Federal revenues through a tax on the production of whiskey and if the complaining counties were greater consumers of whiskey than other regions, it was, according to Hamilton, “in their interest to become less so.” “It depends on themselves by diminishing the consumption, to restore equality," he argued.

The American Revolution had erupted some years earlier over British excise taxes in the form of a tax on sugar, then stamps, and then other necessities that could not be produced in America. The Patriot’s argument was that only the colonies could levy such taxes on themselves - only local political organizations, well aware of what they were taxing, who, and what the tax burdens already were had that right. When King George insisted that he would use his soldiers to make colonists pay Parliamentary excise taxes, we saw tea in the harbor and the rest was history.

When Alexander Hamilton later determined that the Federal government would need money to pay off its newly acquired debts, it was short work to determine that those taxes would come from excise taxation, not property taxation. Hamilton decided to start with the taxation of something that most people regarded as a vice anyway – whiskey. What better place to begin than a product that blue blooded rum drinking Yankees could agree to condemn.

Westerners did not appreciate excise taxes on anything, much less whiskey, and they certainly did not want the Federal government levying them. Their own State had tried to levy such taxes in Pennsylvania already. The tax had been resisted – often violently - and the distillers of Western Pa, had thought that the matter was, as a consequence, dead. They did not appreciate hearing the news when Secretary Hamilton picked up the baton and asserted a Federal right to do something that the distillers own State had determined not to do. And they figured that resistance to the Federal attempt would end the way that resistance to the state attempt had ended.

Thomas Slaughter’s book attempts to set the context of the Whiskey Rebellion, outline its chronology, and describe its consequences. At its heart, the resistance of the Western frontier to taxation of this sort had to do with its perception that they were being used. Vermont governor, Madaline Kunin once explained that people are either “at the table or on the menu” and the farmers/rentors of Western lands were definitely feeling “on the menu.” “Many backwoodsman now believed that government officials sought to deny them the fruits of independence,” writes Slaughter,

“ – to exclude them from the ‘all men’ of the Declaration of Independence. . . . They still felt abused by unfair taxes, lack of protection from Indians, uncertain boundaries, allotment of the region’s best lands to speculators, and lack of accessible markets for their produce.”

When, in the 1780’s, Westerners discovered that Eastern commercial interests may have traded away their ability to use the Mississippi River for trade, they smoldered in anger. “Damn John Jay!,” they said of the man responsible for the treaty that did so,

“Damn everyone that won't damn John Jay! Damn every one that won't put lights in his window and sit up all night damning John Jay!”

Western farmers could feel the impact of Eastern policies that seemed intentionally designed to suppress Western interests in favor of Eastern interests.

“Virginian Richard Henry Lee concurred with the views of other Eastern nationalists, including George Washington, when he wrote that ‘if this navigation [of the Mississippi] could be opened and the benefits be such as are chimerically supposed, it must, in its consequences, depopulate and ruin the old states."

What Hamilton intended to do with his Whiskey tax was pay debts to Eastern bankers and curb the lawless drunkenness of a lawless inebriated wild west. Thomas Slaughter sets the stage by describing the sorts of people that this tax was to impose upon.

“Inhabitants struck one visitor as a ‘a parcel of abandoned wretches,’ who lived ‘like so many pigs in a sty.’ Another described settlers as ‘the scum of nature.’ And many had examples of interpersonal violence as well as filth to report. One was appalled that a man horsewhipped, then fatally shot another who had kicked his dog while trying to break up a dog fight. Others we marked with horror on the number of one eyed men, victims of eye gouging, who resided on the frontier. The amount of whiskey consumed, and the uninhibited violence of those under its influence, apparently transcended anything that easterners had ever witnessed or imagined.”

To compare the Western land farmers to some contemporary sub-population, we might compare them to inner city ghettos with high crime rates, drug addiction rates, and poverty. “The bottom 10% of taxpayers,” Thomas Slaughter says,

“was falling from ownership of 2% to 1% of the region's land as the top decile increased its possessions from about 26% to 35% by the mid-1790s. Nothing like the mythical classless frontier society ever existed in the Western country. Upper and lower classes locked in place, and opportunities for upward mobility we're becoming increasingly limited. By the 1790s the percentage of wealth controlled by the lowest decile of the population dropped to zero in several western townships. About one quarter of the taxable male population became "croppers," laborers who farmed the land of others and paid their rent in crops.

“Most of the great landowners who profited from the consolidation of wealth in the western countries were outsiders. [Only] a few of the great residential landholders of the 1780s were able to hold their ground against Eastern speculators. . . .”

“Wealth became concentrated in the hands of fewer men residing in the West, while absentee owners from the east enhanced their holdings. A majority of residents experienced a sharp decline in all economic categories even as they pushed back the edge of the wilderness.”

One surmises that Bernie Sanders would have been a vocal critic of what was going on. “The increasing wealth of faceless absentee landlords who controlled the best lands of the region was also obvious,” Slaughter adds,

“Resentment grew over time as the pattern of loss and gain became apparent to even the humblest, most ill-educated of the frontiersmen. By the 1790s, the Western Counties faced the potentially explosive combination of a disgruntled rural proletariat ruled by a very small number of comparatively wealthy overlords.”

“County sheriffs, the actual enforcers of law, were among the wealthiest 10% of the population. This was an apparent conspiracy of wealth, law, and power that bred resentment among a portion of the citizenry. These visible manifestations of inequality were resented by tenant farmers, who resisted a tax structure based upon the items of domestic production rather than on land. Common people perceived that the government – as embodied in these men – conspired against them. Such perceptions lead those at the bottom to reason in class terms, to equate Easterners with wealth, power, and absentee landlordisim, and to see local enforcers of eastern laws as self-interested lackeys of Eastern elites.”

In modern terms, these were people who would have seen all expressions of official (Eastern) authority as threats. They would have been angry before offended you might say (like some portions of the black population of Ferguson, Missouri?) These were people who had come to this region of the country with high hopes but who felt profoundly abandoned by those in power – people who, they expected, would use their power to help them but seemed only to know how to use it to exploit them. Slaughter explains the context of the violence that would erupt all over the Western Counties when the Whiskey tax enforcement program began.

“Many Westerners had left the cities with the belief that life would be materially better in the west, if not easier. They had braved the wilderness to acquire their own land, and instead they were as a group considerably poorer and they now had to suffer Indian attacks and much harsher living conditions. To find after such promises that their chances of ever owning land, of ever escaping the grasp of landlords, was even more remote than in the East, was especially devastating. Finally, and even more frustrating, was the absence of the very landlords on whom they could focus their wrath. Unlike in the East, a high and growing percentage of the renter class was invisible to them. There were fewer opportunities to negotiate grievances or to engage personally in the reciprocal relationships associated with dependency. Their expectations had been raised, the realities lowered, and the perpetrators – as they saw it- of their condition were mere names on leases and ejectment suits. Here were people "much disappointed in getting land," a disgruntled populace waiting for a spark to ignite and aim their rage.”

Hamilton would not be able to understand the violence that erupted against the excise tax officials sent to collect these taxes. He would only be able to see such lawlessness as result of a want of upbringing, education, religion, patriotism, and basic morality. He would not interpret these acts as the desperate anguish of a people long crushed by distant faceless forces that they could not reach – victims of economic predator drones that could never be retaliated against. These are people who would thus take all their aggressions out on those who showed up to collect what higher but more distant powers had determined was owed. From the Western farmer’s perspective, these taxes would never be returned to them in the form of services. They did not believe government promises to the contrary. Experience had taught them not to. These taxes, farmers believed, would simply disappear into the bank accounts of the already rich. IN time, they would be the funds used to buy more land at higher prices than the payers could afford.

“No one helps the frontiersman at these times of hardship. No one sent food or medicine from Philadelphia to save the children. No eastern army succeeded in crushing the Indians once and for all. No resources came from the state government to repair the roads or build new routes to far-away markets for the fruits of their labor. The frontiersman were alone and resigned to it. They were a fiercely independent people that accepted the labor, the lice, and the landscape of the wilderness with stoic, often stuporous fortitude. In return, they demanded total liberty to fight the Indians whenever and however they wanted, to trade in markets where ever they could be found, and to spend the meagre profits of their labors as they saw fit.”

“The national government's inability to defeat Indians or secure free navigation of the Mississippi River left them reluctant to pay for a central government that delivered no visible services.”

“’To be subject to all the burdens and enjoy none of the benefits arising from government,’ the frontiersman avowed, ‘is what we will never submit to.’"

Life was hard enough already. Having their own government taking what meager actual cash they had left seemed beyond tyrannical. Taxing whiskey, as it turns out went much deeper than the simple taxing of an addictive substance. It went deeper than, say, the taxation of cigarettes today. Thomas Slaughter explains.

“In the region where labor was exceedingly scarce, only the free use of alcoholic beverages could secure the steady engagement of agricultural laborers. Workmen demanded frequent and liberal drafts of liquor and would simply move on when denied their ration. It was to fill this sort of need that stills were erected in the first place. Commercial sale of the beverage was only a secondary function of distillation. To tax whiskey at the point of production was, therefore, an untoward burden in the West because much liquor was never sold, and the quantities that reached local markets seldom brought much cash.”

A tax on whiskey was. in a way, a tax on Western currency use.

Both sides had ample reason to buy into conspiracy theories. The Frontier populace “conjured visions of rapacious tax gatherers breaking down their doors, ransacking their households, defiling their wives and daughters, dragging men from their beds and off into the night for possession of a dram of un-excised whiskey.”

Federalist officials in the East saw foreign plots behind the disturbances. “Since citizens of the backcountry were unable, in the eyes of some, to think for themselves,” Slaughter argues,

“It appeared likely that their opinions originated from someplace else. France was the likely candidate in the era of its Revolution, but England and Ireland were also commonly mentioned as probable suppliers of both the grumblings of anti-excise polemicists and the rabble who shared such un-American views.”

One side saw an unavoidable trajectory towards tyranny. The other, saw incontrovertible proofs of treason. And as with most conflicts of this nature, the fight was not just over what had happened so much as over what they feared would happen.

Why did George Washington approve of the tax and the raising of an army to enforce it? Here the plot thickens. As it turns out, George Washington was one of the richest of those distant speculating landholders in Western Pennsylvania. “Eventually,” we are told, “Washington would own over 63,000 acres of trans-Appalachian land, becoming one of the largest absentee landlords the Western country knew during his day.”

What is worse, Washington had often disguised his purchases through proxies to avoid laws against just the sort of massive speculating he was engaged in. Using his financial resources, George Washington had been purchasing up large swaths of the best farmland in the region - land that he intended to sell at significant gains in the future. “Washington and other absentee landlords monopolized much of the area's best land,” Slaughter writes,

“While local farmers labored to scratch a living from what remained. Washington owned thousands of acres and did not even farm or live on them, although he tried to hide these facts by having his agent build dummy dwellings on the tracts. It just did not seem right to the local people. As a consequence, Washington and other speculators rapidly became the most despised men in the Western country.”

There is a certain irony to having our nation’s capital named after this guy I suppose. We would call this a “conflict of interest” today. Washington, the man in charge of the very treaties that would determine the value of this land, was one of the principle parties to benefit if those policies were favorable to his financial interests.

“To several officials, Washington expressed his view that opening the Mississippi River to American trade should not be an immediate goal of negotiations with Spain. ‘The navigation of the Mississippi,’ he wrote, ‘at this time ought to be no object with us. On the contrary, until we have a little time allowed to open and make easy the ways between the Atlantic States and the Western territory, the obstruction had better remain. There is nothing which binds one country or one state to another but interest.’"

“The immediate needs of Western settlers for markets must be sacrificed to the long-term benefits of eastern merchants, Eastern Canal investors, eastern speculators in Western lands, and, of course, the nation itself.”

Make no mistake. Washington was a nationalist and wanted to do what was best for the county. He just also had a good deal of “skin in the game.” There were legitimate national reasons to suppress the violence and tax resistance in Pennsylvania as it was the closest expression to the capital of what was taking place elsewhere and thus, most embarrassing to the national credibility. But it cannot be forgotten that Washington had a personal stake in the outcome of the whiskey rebellion and its repression.

The suppression of this rebellion, Slaughter notes in his conclusion, “raised the price of Washington’s land by 50 percent.”

That is a conflict of interest.

Ironically, Washington’s whiskey invasion simply forced many frontiersmen to head further inland, away from government control. As the soldiers sent to Western Pennsylvania, drank lots of whiskey and paid cash for it, and as the ham-handedness of the Federalist military action provoked many in the West to join Jefferson’s growing resistance to all such taxes, the region, in the end, benefitted from the conflict. When Jefferson came into office on his white horse of tax-reduction, he eliminated the excise tax for good. Jefferson’s taxes, as you may suspect, were far more likely to be levied on rich merchants in the East.

History doesn’t repeat itself, I often say, but it usually rhymes.

Question for Comment: Which of the following species of taxation do you find most egregious? Sales tax, property tax, inheritance tax, income tax, “sin” taxes, or capital gains taxes? Do you think investment income should be taxed at the same rate as job income? Why or why not?

11/23/2014

James Oakes sets out to understand one single subgroup of antebellum America, slaveholders. He aims to explain where they came from, the process by which they came to possess slaves, the logic they used to justify slavery, how they structured their plantations and farms to exploit slaves, and what they were willing to do to protect them as property.

From his study of slaveholder journals, diaries, letters, and speeches, Oaks has attempted to draw a more accurate picture of just what middle class slave economies looked like on the ground. He draws a few interesting conclusions.

First, he dispels the notion that the standard Southern slave-owner was running a plantation. Most slaves were owned by a farm family with five slaves or fewer (small businesses, not Microsoft operations). “The only surprise in all of this,” Oakes writes,

“is that the middle-aged white farmer with perhaps a handful of slaves quickly disappeared from the history books, replaced by a plantation legend that bears little resemblance to historical reality. . . . To own 20 slaves in 1860 was to be among the wealthiest men in America, easily within the top 5% of southern white families.”

Secondly, he notes that slavery was just one part of a hierarchical system where everyone found themselves pigeonholed into a certain “caste” in the wider society. Slaves were simply at the bottom of that pyramid. “The principle of social equality was not only alien;” he says of Southern society at large, “it was the equivalent of disruption, chaos, and anarchy.” Many maintained the slave system who did not have slaves themselves because they feared the social disorder that would result from any breakdown of the system.

The third reality of the Southern slave system that Oakes outlines has to do with the connection between slaves and commerce. “The distinguishing function of slaves in the South’s market economy,” he writes,

“was to serve not only as a labor supply but also as capital asset. Consequently, the most distinctive feature of black slavery was the systematic effort to dehumanize the slaves by treating them as property.”

Slaves were a “liquid asset” for many slave holders. They were an “investment” that slaveholders hoped would increase in value and that would return profit when sold in time. They looked at slaves much like we might look at stocks and bonds today. They were a mechanism for wealth acquisition. Most slaveholders in the South were involved in land speculation and hoped to buy a piece of property, improve it with slave labor, and then sell at profit and move on. The majority of slave family disruptions took place, says Oakes, when these farmers would sell land for speculative land investments further West and dispose of their slaves in the process. “The most common venture of the large slaveholders was land speculation,” he writes,

“They bought vast tracts in the west and waited for it to be settled – even encouraged settlement – in an unblushing effort to beat the new immigrants out of the cheapest lands. . . . Land and slaves became the two great vehicles through which slaveholders realized their ambitions of fortune. After ‘Jackson and the banks,’ an Alabama master wrote 1834 what most concerned his neighbors was the distribution of public lands. ‘The people cannot be satisfied till they get them for nothing, he complained, or next to nothing.’

“For young men just commencing in life,” James Steer from Louisiana in 1818 wrote, “the best stock, in which you can invest capital, is, I think, Negro stock; Negroes will yield a much larger income than any bank dividend.”

The author notes that many slaveholders were intent on buying and selling for profit margins and rarely settled down. Indeed, one of the reasons why they often lived in such poor conditions had everything to do with the fact that they were not intending to stay where they were. They always had their eyes on some further horizon.

Alexis DeToqueville makes this observation in his classic, Democracy in America.

“In the United States a man builds a house to spend his latter years in it, and he sells it before the roof is on: he plants a garden, and lets it just as the trees are coming into bearing: he brings a field into tillage, and leaves other men to gather the crops: he embraces a profession, and gives it up: he settles in a place, which he soon afterwards leaves, to carry his changeable longings elsewhere.”

A fourth aspect of slaveholder life that might surprise a reader has to do with just how psychologically troubled (consciously or unconsciously) slaveholders were about the morality of what they saw as a “necessary” system.

In 1807, John Mills, a Louisiana master, explained his nuanced moral position to a northern cousin;

“I am a slaveholder myself, and have increased the number within two months past, to twenty-five in the field, besides house and body servants. You must not think that I approve of that inhumane commerce, of tearing them from their native country and friends by force of arms, or by treachery or finesse. No I assure you that there is no man on earth, that can see it anymore horrid light than myself.”

In other words, he assuaged his guilt about using slaves by condemning those who originally kidnapped them from Africa. In many of the sources that Oakes uncovered, there was a deep ambivalence about this institution that only seemed to work when masters had to use violence to get profitable labor from their slaves. “The Important place of religion in the proslavery defense is an indication of how deeply slaveholders felt the need to bring their ethical convictions into line with their daily practices,” Oakes says,

“The only philosophical justification of slavery that ever gained any real popularity amongst slaveholders was the religious one, and the high percentage of proslavery tracks were in fact written by clergyman. Theirs was not an easy task.”

“The contradiction between the implications of evangelical Protestantism and the religious proslavery argument tortured the souls of more than a few masters.”

“A South Carolina slaveholder complained that his father had too much religion to keep his negroes straight. Deeply religious slaveholders frequently complained about the cruelty that was built into slavery. A pious Alabama master found punishment an unpleasant duty, but one nevertheless which in the present state of things, must be attended to. A North Carolina slaveholding minister believed ‘it was a pity that slavery and tyranny must go together – and that there is no such thing as having an obedient and useful slave, without the painful exercise of undue into tyrannical authority.’”

Over and over again, the sources seem to concur on this point. Slavery, slaveholders were told, was supposed to work for slaves and masters. It was supposed to be a win-win arrangement when managed correctly, but almost nowhere did it actually work. And if it did not work, it was always the slaveholder who must not be managing his slaves correctly. Slaveholders were thus inclined to find fault in themselves and in their style of management, not in the system itself. And they worried about the future of a system that they did not know how to escape. The following excerpts may serve to illustrate.

“More specifically, masters feared for their children in a slave society. ‘You know, my dear son, I abhor slavery,’ Henry Laurens protested. ‘I am not the man who enslaved them, nevertheless I am devising means for manumitting many of them and for cutting off the entail of slavery but what will my children say if I deprive them of so much estate?’”

“In the state of slavery, I almost feel that every apparent blessing is attended with a curse,” another slaveholder reports. A South Carolina a slaveholder wrote that “although their wives have no dread of the future – there are but few husbands and fathers of daughters who do not feel at times dreadful apprehensions."

Many of them found themselves slaveholders in spite of their concerns.

“Born and raised in the midst of slavery, Jeremiah Jeter never considered the question of whether human bondage was right or wrong. Nevertheless he was always moved by the great severity of slavery, and so grew up with a determination never to own a slave. But when Jeter married a woman who owned bondsmen, he found himself in a dilemma. The laws of Virginia prohibited manumission unless the slaves were shipped out of the state, and the slaves made it clear they did not want that.”

“The slaveholder confirmed the central tragedy of their lives by declaring their inability and unwillingness to change. ‘We were born under the institution and cannot now change or abolish it,’ a Mississippi slaveholder declared. He would rather be ‘exterminated’ then be forced to live in the same society with the slaves, if freed.”

“If different masters manifested varying degrees of guilt,” Oakes argues, “few escaped it entirely, for the elements of psychological conflict were intrinsic to slaveholding culture.”

Oakes suggests that the Southern economy provided few avenues to prosperity that did not require slave labor and that the temptation was far too ubiquitous for aspiring farmers to resist indefinitely.

“’I abominate slavery,’ Henry Watson Junior of Alabama had written in 1835, shortly after moving to the south. But within fifteen years, Watson had repudiated his youthful ideas. ‘If we do commit a sin owning slaves,’ he wrote his wife, ‘it is certainly one which is attended with great conveniences.’”

“What's slaveholding did to the economic pyramid of white society was to expand its highest stratum,” the author writes. “In 1860, the twelve wealthiest counties in United States were below the Mason-Dixon line. Adams County, Mississippi, had the highest per capita wealth of any county in the nation.” Just as the only road out of poverty in some inner cities today involves drugs or basketball, ambitious starters in the South were eventually forced to consider careers that involved land speculation or slavery (usually both).

This “reality” led to the need for multiple psychological defenses. To profit from slaves, slaves had to work. Making slaves work generally required the master to inflict some kind of abuse (or threaten to inflict it). “Few slaveholders ever bothered to offer a coherent racial defense of bondage in their letters or diaries,” Oakes writes,

“So ingrained were their racist assumptions that slaveholders were most likely to reveal themselves by recoiling in shock from the mere hint of racial egalitarianism or anti-slavery sentiment. Black equality was simply inconceivable, a subject not even open to discussion.”

“Alexander Stephens came as close as any slaveholding politician to articulating a racial defense of slavery. ‘As a race, the African is inferior to the white man,’ he told the Virginia secession convention in 1861. ‘Subordination to the white man, is his normal condition. Our system, therefore, so far as regards this inferior race, rests upon this great immutable law of nature.’ If few slaveholders publicly carried the logic of racism as far as Stephens, still fewer publicly disagreed with his conclusions.”

“For his argument to hold, his assumptions had to be racist, but his defense of slavery was primarily one of economics and property rights: he had bought his slaves and paid for them. A South Carolina master agreed. ‘The slaves’ earnings belong to me, because I bought him; and in return for this, I give him maintenance, and make a handsome profit besides.’ That was the way most slaveholders preferred to look at it.”

“Many slaveholders apparently believed that if it could be shown that British workers were oppressed and somehow southern slavery was justified.”

Slaveholders, when they were not repressing the question entirely, relied on excuses that only worked because everyone used them. Slaves were better off in slavery. Other systems of exploitation were just as bad. It would be risking the lives of our women folk to let the slaves go free. Etc. For many of them, the clinching argument had to do with freedom itself. Slavery is what allowed freedom. And because freedom was a good end, slavery had to be indirectly good.

“In this country alone does perfect equality of civil and social privilege exist among the white population, and it exists only because we have black slaves,” the Richmond inquirer declared. “Freedom is not possible without slavery.”

“In Jackson's wake, southern politicians quickly learned to connect their devotion to freedom to the defense of slavery.”

The last thing that I learned about the slaveholders of the American South from this book is something that I sometimes think about education. Teaching in a public high school, I am, not unlike the slaveholders of Antebellum America, in the business of getting people to work without pay. We educators are constantly going to workshops to learn how to do this better. But I sometimes wonder if maybe it is the system itself that keeps it from working.

“The almost religious zeal with which the advocates of managerial expertise advertise their systems exposed their conception of themselves as reformers. Although most of the authors were slaveholders writing from experience and observation, they wrote also out of frustration with prevailing practices.”

“The reformers were similarly frustrated in their efforts to promote a system of management so perfectly rationalized that the physical punishment of slaves was all but eliminated. In theory, whipping was the last resort; in practice, it was the disciplinary centerpiece of plantation slavery. ‘If the law was to forbid whipping altogether,’ a Louisiana slaveholder said, ‘the authority of the master would be at an end.’”

“Frederick Olmstead correctly perceived that the most productive plantations throughout the seaboard slave states were those where the slaves had the most autonomy.”

In other words, the best way to make slavery work was to get rid of it. It is a shame that it took a devastating war to do something that made such common sense.

Question for Comment: Have you ever tried to make a system work that no amount of tinkering with could make work?

11/22/2014

Lynn Hudson Parson’s book, The Birth of Modern Politics: Andrew Jackson, John Quincy Adams, and the Election of 1828 details the personalities and events surrounding the elections of 1824 and 1828, elections that redefined Presidential campaigns in the United States and gave us all those things that we have come to despise about politics in American life today.

Men in American Presidential elections had always been ambitious. They had always pursued power with passion; but not publically. Washington, John Adams Sr., Jefferson, Madison, Monroe and John Quincy Adams had all been nominated by their various party caucuses in Congress. They had been reticent about “courting” mass popularity, fearing that it would be seen as crass, undignified, and overtly ambitious. To “campaign” publically would be akin to campaigning to be prom queen in a modern high school. Public pursuit of the popular vote would have been seen as akin to prostituting oneself for power. To campaign was to betray a love of power inconsistent with trust in a Republican system.

The elections of 1824 and 1828 broke that conviction. They first tolerated and then justified the use of party politics in ways that we still find so revolting and yet that we still seem to continue responding to. Can a person “run a clean campaign” in modern political life and win? Some would say “no.” Not if there is enough power to attract the seedier elements to the contest.

The author credits future President Martin Van Buren with introducing a new style to political campaigning in New York and of transposing that style to the national elections in the early 1820’s. “We must always have party distinctions,” Van Buren said. “They prevent apathy.” He insisted that the country was being run by elites in congressional boardrooms and to save Jeffersonian democracy, the masses needed mobilizing and they would only do so if motivated by men who understood them and their limitations and used their tendency to faction” against them. The electorate, as it turned out, jumped from 27 percent to 57 percent of the white male populace in these four short years as a result of this shift in thinking. The people, whether enlightened or educated or not, began to think themselves the best qualified force for picking Presidents. They would get, as a consequence, for good or bad, the arch-Democrat, Andrew Jackson. (interestingly, most Democrats today prefer to see Jefferson as the father of their party. Not Jackson.

The election of 1828, Parsons informs us, introduced much of what we know of as modern politics; “Large organized rallies, coordinated media efforts, fund raising, opposition research, negative advertisements, opinion polling, slogans and buttons and the cult of personality.” Furthermore, the election of 1828 was a watershed event in that it was truly democratic … It marked the beginning of mass political parties whose sole aim was to mobilize large groups of people to vote for whatever reasons could be used to effect the outcome desired. Many have suggested that it is the origin of a competition between parties, not ideas and that argument is made evident in the course of the book’s narrative. The battle between Jackson and Adams was a battle of images and Jackson’s forces proved far more capable of winning that fight. The fact that most of Adams’ ideas about the role of Federal power in improving the lives of Americans have been adopted over the years while most of Jackson’s ideas have been discarded may go far to proving the point. If you ever drive on an interstate highway, thank Adams, not Jackson.

The election of 1828, however, warned all aspiring Presidents of the future to conceal their intellectual gifts so much as possible (Perhaps Woodrow Wilson has been one of the few candidates to pull off an “I-am-obviously-smarter-than-you victory). Jackson proclaimed himself the choice of the people and Adams the choice of Washington insiders. He took Adams’ many years of service as evidence of compromise and complicity with aristocracy. Adams was either unwilling or unable to defend himself without using words that the target audience often could not understand or even read. Jackson’s managers used lithography and conventions and media events and newspaper editorials to produce an image of Jackson that no rhetorical device of a Harvard-educated former professor-slash-diplomat could overcome. To put it mildly, Jacksonians supported Jackson using the language of the electorate that they were aiming at. Adams, on the other hand, campaigned for the public’s vote like the public was the Congressional caucus that he would have had to convince in the old days. Alas, it was not the old days and the American people were not speaking that language.

It was as if Adams went to Joe six-pack and said “Vote for me. I am erudite.” While Jackson said, “Vote for me. I ain’t.” Adams could only shake his head in dismay. He did not know how to use the word “aint” and it showed in the polls. The higher the educational level of the electorate, the better his numbers.

“He deliberates, he decides, and he acts,” the Tennessee legislature said of Jackson when they nominated him for President. Jackson, it was suggested, made law. “Adams quoted it.” At every point, Adams was better qualified. He had been an ambassador his whole life. He had served as Congressman, Senator, and Secretary of State. He knew several languages. He knew foreign leaders and protocols for dialoging with them. He had graduated from Harvard and had taught there. He was well read. By the standards of his day, says Parsons in contrast, Jackson “was the least qualified man ever to run for the Presidency.” And the people loved him for it.

Jackson’s handlers turned all these advantages of Adams into liabilities. Voters should want a President who was more ordinary, the Jacksonians insisted. Adams spoke Latin and Greek and French (as had Jefferson) but now it was not important to be better than the electorate. It was important to be “one of them.” The Congressional Caucus was a casualty of the 1824 election Parsons says. In the Transcendental spirit of the age, every man, educated or not, was to be regarded as having an inner genius equal to that of Harvard professors and viable candidates had to be seen as knowing how to run chainsaws in hardhats.

Jackson’s supporters were able to convince the public that all other candidates were part of an insiders’ conspiracy dedicated to the interests of a rising aristocracy. “One man stands aloof from the intrigue of the day” one supporter, calling himself “Wyoming,” argued in a famous pamphlet, linking Jackson to George Washington.

“In the purer atmosphere of the early days of the republic [elections] were not an inquiry into who could write a paragraph with the greatest classical purity [a swipe Adams] or who the most finished veteran at intrigue was [a swipe at William Crawford] The question was ‘Who is he that, fearless of the consequences and regardless of the danger, has breasted the storm in the hour of peril and risked himself for his country? . . . Jackson is one of you.”

Jackson would not care how someone danced in Europe, Wyoming would insist. Nor does the American electorate care “how the people eat and sleep in London.”

“Wyoming would damn Adams with faint praise where he knew Adams had advantages. Adams would be called a great “scholar” perhaps he demurred but then added that it was “from his books that he has acquired all that he has learned.” Adams supporters tried to take advantage of spelling errors in Jackson’s letters. “What will foreign intellectuals say about a country led by a man who cannot spell one word in four?” they asked plaintively forgetting that most people in America couldn’t spell either.

“We care not if he spell Congress with a K” said pro-Jackson editor, Duff Green in retaliation.

Jackson could point out that George Washington misspelled words. Deep reading and scholarship are not essential, the people seem to have said. Scholarship had little public purpose. Adams’ forces forgot to ask, “What if intellectual powers did not qualify you any more?” They just assumed that it should.

“General Jackson has not been educated at foreign courts and reared on sweet meats from the tables of kings and princes,” Jacksonian papers insisted. “He had not the privilege of visiting the courts of Europe at public expense.” “Where were Adams and Clay while Jackson was risking his life in defense of his country?” they asked insistently, “Enjoying the gala days of Europe mingling with royalty and parading at courts with laced coats and feathers.” “A close application of books … render men ignorant of human nature,” they continued, “Mr. Adams is possessed of learning. … and yet the nation may be little better off.”

Jacksonian, Mordichai Noah asserted that “No person can have a correct knowledge of mankind who has led a life of entire abstraction from the great body of the people and who relies for this information on the books he has read.”

Anti-intellectualism was at high tide and in this election, the differences between the candidates made that all the difference.

But Jackson’s 1828 victory was not simply the result of his ability to paint Adams as a Bostonian snobocrat. Jackson took advantage of Adams’ unwillingness to compete for the office and his inability to if he wanted to. It was widely understood that, in contrast to the flamboyant Jackson, Adams was “retiring, unobtrusive, studious, cool and reflecting and does nothing to excite attention or gain friendships,” as one observer noted, “He is a poor timid Yankee.”

John Quincy Adams intended to have an idea campaign for him (internal improvements). Jackson intended to have a party and the media campaign for him.

Van Buren’s “Albany Regency” was among the first political organizations that could justifiably be called “a machine.” Van Buren was called the little magician because of his ability to organize political victories (I liken him to Bill Belicheck of the New England Patriots). He was a believer in party discipline. He was an organizer. “I had no ticket in that lottery,” said Adams of Van Buren’s political stratagems. Adams believed in the power of ideas over personalities to his own demise. One of his friends would accuse him of a “MacBeth policy” a reference to Shakespeare’s MacBeth who countered his wife’s insistence that he needed to kill the King if he would be one by saying, “If chance will have me king why chance may crown me without my stir.”

“For Adams, the Presidency was a reward for public service;” writes Parsons, “Not a prize to be won through competition. To seek or organize support was to tamper with the outcome. . . . The office would have to come to him.” He would not withhold his name but he would take no part in soliciting that nomination. This, the author says, is called “the mute tribune” approach. Both candidates held to it at first. Both would be forced to compromise in some way (Van Buren would see to that). But Jackson was the first to understand that the “days of the mute tribune were over” and adopted the new paradigm with relish.

When Presidents were chosen by Congressional caucus, one could afford to leave the decisions to those who knew your character and contributions. But once the election went to the populace, Parsons argues, this procedure of passive sitting and waiting for a few men to ask you to dance would not win. And though Adams did stoop to writing pamphlets in defense of his character and past contributions, he would not engage in writing “attack ads” on others. Sometimes his defenses only called attention to the accusations. In this enterprise, no one stopped Adams from being Adams.

But these are not the only reasons that Adams lost. Many would argue that he lost because he was not willing to play politics with public service jobs as Jackson was. Time and again, Adams refused to turn public office holders out of their jobs for being political allies of his enemies. After taking power in 1824 (Thanks to Henry Clay’s support in the House of Representatives), Adams aimed at healing partisan wounds while Jackson went about rubbing salt in them, labeling Adams’ new Secretary of State, Henry Clay “the Judas of the West.”

“The baneful weed of party strife had withered away,” Adams said in his inaugural hoping that the days or partisan rancor had passed and a return to the “era of good feelings” again could be resumed. He tried to maintain this approach in the face of increasing partisanship by rehiring all federal employees regardless of their partisan leanings or public support or lack thereof.

As it turns out, he may have been woefully idealistic to do so for Jacksonians gave him no credit for it and battered his reputation as a fountainhead of corruption anyway. Adams hoped that a program of national internal improvements all over the country would soon provide a counter to the charge that he only wanted to benefit the “few” and that this program would be the impetus for national pride and unity. But Jacksonians in Congress blocked his every attempt to do anything of the sort. “The will of the people is the source, and the happiness of the people is the end of all legitimate government,” Adams had said in his inaugural address, calling the US “a great representative democracy.” But the Jacksonian forces who aimed only at the election of their candidate in 1828 blocked his attempts to do something for the people at every point (“Grog-shop politicians” one pro-Adams paper called them).

The Jacksonians simply argued that the American System that Adams proposed was nothing but repackaged Federalism. “Power constituted a threat to liberty” in all cases, they insisted. Only distributed power protected liberty from tyranny. And their candidate, Andrew Jackson would see to it that power would be kept distributed (to his friends mind you, in my opinion). Jackson would only fund roads and forts to provide for the common defense. He would not tolerate such expenditures for the common economy, for to do so risked looking like he was primarily interested in the well-being of commerce at the expense of labor.

This brings up a fourth cause of the Jacksonian revolution of 1828. General Jackson, who had served very little time in the U.S. Senate, and had maintained such a profile there that none of his votes could be used against him, was careful after his loss in 1824, to say as little as possible about what exactly he was for outside of throwing the corrupt Adams-Clay hunta out of office. He studiously remained vague about anything that might divide his cobbled together constituency of “anti’s.”

Adams’ State of the Union message concluded with an appeal to the program of internal improvements. He spelled out his own understanding of Republicanism. Adams believed that power could promote liberty. “The great object of civil government is the improvement of those who are parties to the social compact.” This involved an accelerated program of road and canals, scientific exploration, a national university, uniform weights and measures, and a national observatory – “lighthouses of the sky” - Adams called them. “The Spirit of improvement is upon the earth,” Adams insisted. asking that Americans contribute through higher taxes, to a national program of education, exploration, funded science and art.

He suggested that we should be like other countries … instead of “dooming ourselves to perpetual inferiority.“

Jackson’s forces took advantage of the fact that these lofty programs all smacked of business and educational elitism, public support for college educated snobs and, without saying why these things would be necessarily useless, declared them so. All of Adams’ political opponents saw his spending priorities as so many violations of State’s rights. They saw it as too much power in the hands of too few. They criticized Adams of trying to make America look like Europe. They revived old charges of Federalist elitism and dismissed his ideas as mechanisms of corruption. The annual message with Jackson’s response to it, thus brought about the reconstruction of parties with one of those parties being committed to saying as little as possible about anything that might divide it.

If Adams’ cabinet campaigned, Jackson accused them of using the public dime to campaign for illegitimate power. Jackson avoided self-promotion but supported “the fight against intrigue and corruption.” Jackson remained silent on tariff reform and internal improvements, not seeing the need to divide his own movement with details. Jackson’s voting record had, thankfully for his managers, been bland and vague and they desired to keep it so. For example, Jackson would argue for a “judicious examination and revision of the existing tariff” knowing that no one could really tell what that meant for their own personal taxes. Van Buren suggested that Jackson not publish positions at all. In the absence of issues then, they spent all their time just repeating the need for “Jackson and Reform.” Jacksonians declared that all of Adams’ attempts to reach out to all regions and partisans or to compromise was mere sham and hoax. They sat back and played an effective and deadly game of journalistic character assassination.

Enter reason number five for the Jacksonian landslide. Under the direction of Van Buren and others like him, the Jacksonian “brand” assembled a network of interlocking media outlets that could convey the Jacksonian message and put wet blankets on the Adams’ message. Adams and Clay, it might be said, had a strong network of “inside the beltway” alliances but in the nation’s newspapers, they got shellacked. (One of the reasons why of all the candidates in 1824, only Jackson showed strength beyond his section.”) In the media campaign, the Democrats made character and personality the primary issue and saw to it that their candidate would not be handicapped by any clear outline of executive intent (something that Adams had given away in his inaugural address and State-of-the Union address).

The election of 1828, incubated a new breed of editor willing to engage in journalism that combined “rhetorical brutality, fanatic zeal, and intense competitiveness along with a moral code flexible enough to accommodate ideological inconsistency …” Jacksonians in Congress rewarded many of these editors with government printing contracts Parsons notes.

The Birth of Modern Politics provides a litany of examples of how this election serves as the template for modern elections. It would take pages of explanation and illustration to detail them and I have already taxed the readers patience overmuch.

Adams lost because he opposed slavery in an age where the populace had not yet arrived at the place where they would make that opposition a virtue. (After his defeat, Adams would go on to be the earliest and most vociferous opponent of Southern slavery in the U.S. Congress.)

Adams lost because his clarity of position provided just the glue that the diverse opposition needed to unify them.

Adams lost because he was an easy target for a class-based opposition. Indeed, many of his own supporters contributed to the image that he clearly deserved to some degree. Adams supporters described Jacksonians as “acreless men … the ignorant and degraded class … the halt, the lame, and the blind, nearly all drunk … the rabble.” It is no wonder that these people did not care to vote for the Bostonian Brahmin.

Adams lost because he could not talk in the people’s language and because he attempted to maintain a set of principles that were probably beyond them, not having been born with that proverbial silver spoon in their mouths. Adams would give speeches full of references to classical literature as though people were all reading classical literature.

Adams lost because he was not a people organizer or a propagandist on the level of his opposition. He purchased a billiard table for the White House and the Jacksonian press turned it into a slide show of evidence that he was either a priss, a gambler, or a European –nevermind that the three might be inconsistent with each other. (Reminds me of what the Republican press did to John Kerry when pictures of him windsurfing off the beaches of Martha’s vineyard came out.)

Adams lost because his opponents were better suited to smash-mouth politics. Standing politicians began using their franking privileges to campaign (franking privileges allow Congressmen - and today, Congresswomen - to use the U.S. mails free of charge for communicating with their constituencies). Candidates would stamp wrapping paper and then send packages of campaign material home to be dispersed in it. The Jacksonians created a network of newspapers that could deliver a collective message. “No section of the union was ignored.”

Coordinated media, fund raising, opinion polling, image making, smear tactics, dirty tricks, etc. The Jacksonians proved that they had grasped the new rules. The use of graphics, bold print, cartoons, nursery lines, the cadence of language, etc all were used for the first time in the 1828 campaign. And while both Jackson and Adams had image problems, Jackson’s willingness to highlight Adams’ flaws while Adams refused to sponsor the same, doomed Adams’ campaign.

The expanding electorate needed to be handled in new ways. Democrats and in, time, their opposition, in the 1820’s saw the need for effective politics over principled politics. Nothing was more important than the image of the candidate.

And while the Adams supporting papers began giving as good as they got, they were never as naturally talented at it. Often, their heavy handed attempts back-fired, as when they went after Jackson’s marriage to Rachel Jackson, a woman who had divorced her former husband but apparently only after marrying Jackson. Jacksonian papers immediately used the attack as an example of “just how low” Adams and Clay and their cronies would go to hang onto power, insisting that Jackson and Rachel had thought she was divorced and that Rachel Jackson was a paragon of religious piety.

Adams lost, says Parsons, because he trusted the American people to see beyond the mirage created by the Jacksonian media juggernaut. “Seest thou a man diligent in his business?” Adams insisted with a reference to the New Testament, refusing to campaign. “This is no part of my duty.” In this, he was woefully naïve. The Jacksonian campaign had coordinated direction and zeal. Leaders met regularly and corresponded and represented all sections of the Union. Adams’s supporters simply supported his policies but not the man and they did so anemically. It was tough to support a man who did not seem to support himself. Jackson spent cash on the campaign. His future VP., John C. Calhoun, suggested that everyone had to contribute to the effort and the monies were used to back papers, conventions, and media events.

The election turned into an election of images and “it proved to be an uneven competition,” Parsons writes. “Say what you will,’ the losing side lamented after the bloodbath was over, “These Jacksonians are excellent politicians.” They had songs (Listen to “The Hunters of Kentucky” for example). They had scripted toasts. They had campaign paraphernalia.

Parsons calls John Quincy Adams “a president who had planned for the people without ever trying to understand them.”

I find myself empathizing with him.

The story ends with irony, however. John Adams went to Congress after his defeat and used the rest of his life and energy to be a thorn in the side of the Southern slavocracy. Having been President and having no wish to be so again, he could afford, from then on, to say publically exactly what he thought about politically delicate issues.

In a second great irony, When Adams’ new party, the Whigs, elected their next President, they went with image – the hero of Tippecanoe. They picked a man who someone said, “could be given a pension, a log cabin and some whiskey” and then basically used. “Tippecanoe and Tyler too” the Whigs sang in the election that took down Martin Van Buren with a military war hero of their own.

“We have taught them how to defeat us,” lamented a Democrat.

Question for Comment: Do you think it would be possible to return to an era when candidates did not “run” for office? Where we just selected our Presidents in a way like we do Nobel Prize winners? By having qualified evaluators examine their contributions and objectively determine who had contributed the most?

11/03/2014

“One of the most important things that I have learned in my 57 years is that life is all about choices. On every journey you take, you face choices. At every fork in the road, you make a choice. And it is those decisions that shape our lives.” – Mike DeWine

How does a person make decisions when there are just so many different and often opposing forces jostling and shoving and pressuring and prodding and nudging and whispering and pontificating and threatening and seducing and arguing and poking and pulling and wheedling and insisting and asserting and cajoling and simpering and whining and ordering you to do something you are not sure you should do?

Kevin Costner in Draft Day has to figure this out in the context of an NFL football draft. He starts out the day with a decision, stated simply, written on a piece of yellow sticky pad paper. And then the chaos ensues. The owner of his team pressures him to make one decision. His head coach, another. Other teams’ General Managers begin to weigh in with offers and counter-arguments. Players on his team who will be affected have to have their say - then trainers, his mother, his dead father, the fans, sports talk show hosts, draftable players and their coaches, the accountants, advisors, friends, and so on.

What seems clear is that his instincts are muddied by the pressures of competing interests to the point where he can’t even see what his clear original interests were. Competing facts, interpretations, perceptions, feelings, and influences make it impossible for him to figure out what to do. And, to make it all exciting, he is on the clock. Tick, tick, tick. Fortunately, he has someone in his life who is good at helping him tune back into his “inner light.

Draft Day is a metaphor for life writ large.

This is a movie that I should watch again. I have always had a hard time hearing my own voice. One of the disadvantages of living alone so long I guess.

Question for Comment: How do you find your own voice in a world of competing pressures?